"Rather than free falling, I'm free-flying," Carly Rae Jepsen says, the warmth of that untethered freedom radiating in her smile. That artistic liberty fuels the pop star's fifth studio LP, The Loneliest Time.
The album weaves in and out of pure danceable joy, but with the lyrical prowess of a pop artist who has fully embraced every emotion she feels — even if it doesn't spawn a feel-good earworm. With a catalog full of delightful hits like "I Really Like You," "Run Away With Me," and "Call Me Maybe," Jepsen felt it was time to stop trying to figure out her place in the greater pop landscape and just chase the songs that felt right in the moment — and that felt true to herself.
But thanks to Jepsen's pop genius, The Loneliest Time still brims with memorable hooks and candid emotional resonance. There's the sweet and earthy "Western Wind" and the sincere soft folk of "Go Find Yourself or Whatever." Add in the epic title track's expansive disco strings and sloping melody, and it feels as if Jepsen has explored the full spectrum of both pop music and human nature.
"I feel a little less constrained by this idea of what type of pop I'm making," Jepsen says with a calm certainty. "My loneliness made me do some of the bravest and craziest and wildest things of my life. And I loved the reactions that it caused, because they're so dramatic, and I felt it was worthy of an album."
With The Loneliest Time, Jepsen isn't denying or rejecting her past, nor is she ignoring it. This isn't Carly Rae Jepsen reinvented, it's Carly Rae Jepsen in this moment. That's a powerful step for any artist in pop, a genre prone to pigeonholing stars, especially after a runaway hit.
Ahead of the album's release, Jepsen spoke with GRAMMY.com about the emotionally empowering process of The Loneliest Time, maturing as a pop star, and building genuine longevity.
Do you have any tricks for keeping yourself focused and healthy on tour? Personally, I now judge my day by how much water I've had.
So funny, this age that we're in. We've started so many different clubs on this tour. One is Book Club, where we all get ourselves scooched together reading on the bus. We wanna read Dracula for Halloween month!
We also started this thing with me and Josephine, my glam girl, Scott, our merch guy, and Chris, our tour manager, called Water Club. When we see each other we're like, "Have a water". We literally are just helping each other stay hydrated on the road. What does that say about touring in your thirties, that we started a group called The Water Club?
I can only imagine that reflecting on and comparing to how you toured in your twenties is an interesting experience for you.
I've always felt a little like I'm floundering in the good graces of some luck that came my way. That "Where am I?" energy is always with me. But I do feel like this era, being 36 now, and almost 37, I do feel more confident and excited and a little less shocked all of the time. It's kind of registered that this is my life. Which is great.
If anything, I just feel a little bit more purposeful with every decision. A little bit more confident, even with our stage show. I play it like a little boss lady within the group dynamic that we have, where I used to ask questions like, "Why do we do it that way? Could we do it this way?" Having enough meetings to get to the bottom of things that always were big question marks for me. That part's really empowering and exciting.
Lyrically, there is this acknowledgement throughout The Loneliest Time that the softer, gentler version of you is still accessible, even when you're tapping into larger, more powerful emotions. You alluded to intention earlier, which is so appropriate.
Definitely. This album is very much about taking away the things that Scorpios love, the controlling factor or whatever. It is surrendering to everything — whether happiness, love, hardships or grief, taking on the full experience of life and not trying to avoid any of the hard stuff, or fast forward to the good stuff. It's feeling all of the things.
This is what this album really was for me, but that's also very much in line with what my life experience has been over the last few years while working on this. It's a lot of hard-hitting lessons about all of that growth.
I love that you started the album with "Surrender My Heart". When moments are intense and you surrender to it, things are just so much clearer.
Absolutely. It was a very true sentiment when I first started going to therapy — for a lot of reasons. My whole family had dealt with a ton of tragedy all at once. You know that thing, when it rains it pours. I felt like that really happened to us, and my solution to it was so pragmatic. "I'll go to therapy, she'll tell me how to be tougher in life. I will leave with an extra layer of skin and armor and I'll just know how to handle things because life's gonna get harder. I fell apart, let's fix me." And it was just so enlightening to be there in the room. After one session I was like, "Here, take all my money." [Laughs]
She said, "Maybe you need to soften up. Maybe you have to feel all the things." It's so funny, because I'm sitting there being like, "Wait, I wrote an album about being in touch with your emotions. I should be in touch with them." But no, it's still hard to take it in all the time.
I was kind of avoiding some of the experiences of life. And I don't think that's how you get to feel any of the highs or the lows. Being less frightened of both of those things can make you feel a little bit more stabilized. You continue on without denying any of the highs or the lows as they happen. That's a really huge part of it for me.
I see other people who walk through life just doing things that I admire so much. I have a girlfriend right now who's going through some big grief and every time I hang out with her she's just like, "I'm sad." And I'm like, "Cool, well be sad with me. Let's be sad and have a sad day together." Just seeing her being brave enough to do that makes me feel braver when I'm having an off day.
There's power in not wanting to fix everything at every point. And while I don't necessarily think it stems from control, it can stem from this sense of perfection and ideas that we've all been sold, which you cover a lot in your music — of how things are meant to be, how love is meant to be, and sometimes it isn't.
Yes! I think that tension between how it's "supposed" to be and what it is, there's some real dissonance in there that gets to be worked out. But if you can let go of how it's supposed to be and just be really accepting of how it is, I think you're off to a good start.
Emotion was about fusing together everything you had learned on Kiss and Tug of War, and Dedicated started going into heartbreak and creating that new story. Now that you're on your fifth studio album, where do you feel like you're at now? What was the guidepost for you while writing the album?
Rather than free falling, I'm free-flying! I feel a little less constrained by this idea of what type of pop I'm making. Is it '80s? '70s? '90s? Am I sad or happy? What am I emoting as a message? It's like, screw all of that. At this point, being 10 years into the business and change, I am a woman. There are many different things I feel. I can be very playful, I can be hurt and resentful and confused, and I can also have a disco ballad that's five minutes long, and indulgent, and is my opus. And all on the same album, because I contain multitudes.
I believe that people are ready to expand this pigeonholed idea of what a pop artist can be, which is a genre that's very tricky to break out of the mold of. You can be all of the things. And I've felt that desire in this genre that is so playful in the types of music that you can do.
But I wanna also break the perception of, "Am I the sexy pop artist?" I just don't wanna have to fight that fight anymore. For The Loneliest Time, the main theme of it is just loneliness and how that can cause such extreme reactions within you. Because my loneliness made me do some of the bravest and craziest and wildest things of my life. And I loved the reactions that it caused, because they're so dramatic, and I felt it was worthy of an album.
I was less concerned with, "Are they all gonna fit?" and a little bit more excited that they would be as diverse as they were meant to be — and to let the songs speak for themselves.
There's this intriguing blend between pure fragility and super confidence. You just sound like you're having the time of your life.
Thank you. I really overwrite. Even last night I was with my A&R talking about what we could potentially consider if we were to do a B-side [record]. And we were laughing, like, "Let's bring up the folders again."
So much thought goes into these things. It's a little bit of a Beautiful Mind mapping. By the time I'm done I'm like, "Oh my God, I seem insane." But it was a method to the madness, and I swear I feel that way every time. When I know it feels done and the order feels good, it was some puzzle I had to unlock. But as much as I'm like, "This is not cohesive," it, to me, is meant to be together.
Maybe I rebel because of having a song like "Call Me Maybe". I've just so desired to be [putting] all of my attention into being an album artist since then, not a single artist. And that's maybe why I put out B-sides that aren't even counted at the label. They're just gifts.
There's something of a gift with The Loneliest Time, too — people are really coming to understand that you want to be understood. I like the immediacy here.
Thank you. You know how you can only gush to certain people about the things that you're secretly really excited or a little proud of? I almost feel guilty saying that word, like it should be shameful. But I'm embracing it. Like, "What am I happy about?" I said it to my boyfriend last night, because we just did the final cut and color [for a video], and I'm like, "It's so lovely."
You can look back on a career with nostalgia, and like Björk said once, "I don't wanna be a nostalgic artist." I really loved that. I love that we're constantly pushing forward, especially for a woman in pop music.
There was a time where I thought, "It's a young woman's game." So for me to be 36, almost 37 and feel like I'm about to put out my favorite video of my career? It's not so much about anything other than the growth. I've learned how to communicate. And to have the trust of a team at the label now.
It took me a long time to have that confidence, but also to feel like I have a team of people who trust that we can do this together. We can find the right pieces. For the first time in a hot minute, I was like, "Well, I don't wanna be stale. I don't wanna just be putting out music because I'm chasing a thing that was a dream when I was a teen. I'm just as invigorated and as excited now. Why not take all the lessons I've learned and keep growing?"
For pop artists that I look at — there's a few, like Cyndi Lauper — but I would love to be a part of that catalog that gets to have some longevity with this thing. That'd feel fantastic. That's my secret goal and I'm saying it out loud to you.
I appreciate that, and when you are having fun — the raw, pure, sugar-rush fun — even in a song that covers really wobbly moments, your artistry has legs. It makes the listener excited for what's to come.
You're so right. Joy is the spot. I had a child come into a VIP Q&A session, and she asked, "Do you write when you're sad or when you're happy?" And I was like, "It's interesting because when I'm sad, I wanna eat a tub of ice cream and do nothing." But I know that there are artists that go to those places they wanna emote to get through. When I get out of my sadness is when I might be able to start talking about my sadness. Then there's a spark, a curiosity I have about it.
I think that's where "Bends" came from. I think that's where "Surrender My Heart" and "Go Find Yourself" [came from]. My creativity is sparked around a really limitless possibility, a free-flying feeling where you're like, "I'm here to catch this feeling in a way and document it." And it does feel quite joyful.
*Carly Rae Jepsen | Photo: Meredith Jenks*
You have this ease and comfortability because you use pop as an escape, to a degree, but you're also not running away from these feelings.
Oh yeah. I think that's a real difference with even how I'm looking at shows lately. It was, "Come to my show. We're gonna forget how scary the world is for a night. I'm here to help you." And now I'm looking at it in the way that I experience the best shows that I go to.
I recently saw James Taylor and I said to my boyfriend, "Just so you know, I grew up on James Taylor, and he's this link between my divorced parents. I'm gonna cry a lot, Maybe I'll be fine." He hadn't seen me cry, so I was thinking it was gonna be super embarrassing if it happened.
I make it through the first half of the set dry-eyed. And then [James] comes out and he's like, "Fire and Rain," "Sweet Baby James," "The Secret of Life." And my neck is wet. It was just a wet neck situation. [Laughs]
[My boyfriend] was putting his arm around me, and James was telling these stories, and by the time it was done, I was like, "I'm so sorry. I can't stop." There was clearly some stuff I needed to feel.
"The Secret of Life" is the last song that my mom heard in the car the day my grandmother died. I wasn't there because of COVID, but I knew that experience. So I got to feel some things in a safe place that I needed to feel, really safely, really comfortably. And it felt wonderful. I had been needing that night. And it was so cathartic that when I left, I felt 10 pounds lighter.
That's what the best, most joyful experiences can make me feel. When I saw David Byrne's "American Utopia," my brain got twisted about what a concert could be. Holy s—, I felt better about life. I thought, "God, I've been looking at this all wrong. I've been thinking my job is to help people escape, but what if my job is to help people feel whatever it is they need to? Or a little bit of both?"
That's where I got the idea for the moon mascot who comes at the beginning of our show on this tour and goes, "Tonight is for you to feel what you need to in a safe place, to escape if you need to." Hopefully it can be that for some people.
Feeling the confidence that you can be the type of artist that you look at and are inspired by, that's the ultimate achievement, right?
It is the best feeling. That's the dream, the goal. Some joy, some happiness, but also some real in-touch-ness with yourself, and maybe some sadness too — all in a cathartic way.